Another very striking thought in this connection is that while the physical effects may not show in the individual himself, nor in his children, they may be manifest in the deterioration of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A prominent temperance advocate who was laid up with rheumatic gout, which is apt to be the result of alcoholic indulgence, replied to a friend who wondered that he, a drinker of cold water, should suffer with this disease, "Yes, my ancestors drank the liquor and I foot the bills." In 1834 the Parliament of the British House of Commons made a report of intemperance in which they stated that the evils of alcoholism "are cumulative in the amount of injury they inflict, as intemperate parents, according to high medical testimony, give a taint to their offspring before birth, and the poisonous stream of spirits is conveyed through the milk of the mother to the infant at the breast; so that the fountain of life, through which nature supplies that pure and healthy nutriment of infancy, is poisoned at its very source, and a diseased and vitiated appetite is thus created, which grows with its growth, and strengthens with its increasing weakness and decay." A tendency to commit suicide seems to be a marked bequest of an inebriate parent to his children, and it is well to state that in the opinion of medical men who are dealing with all forms of inebriety, the evils resulting to the children may be transmitted by parents who have never been noted for drunkenness. Continual moderate drinking keeps the body so constantly under the influence of alcohol that a crowd of nervous difficulties and disorders may be transmitted even more surely than from the parent who has occasional sprees with long intervals of sobriety between. It is not only through the drinking father that injury is done to the children, but the mother may have a vitiated inheritance from her father and transmit it to her children.